During the IMFS Policy Webinar on May 19, Philip Lane, Chief Economist of the European Central Bank (ECB), took stock of the ECB’s pandemic bond-buying program PEPP and gave an outlook on further possible monetary policy measures. Vítor Gaspar of the International Monetary Fund illustrated the strong increase in debt due to the corona crisis. In the panel discussion of the online event on the date when the conference “The ECB and Its Watchers“ was originally scheduled, Elga Bartsch of Blackrock, Prof. Francesco Giavazzi of Bocconi University and Prof. Volker Wieland, IMFS and Goethe University, shared their views on possible approaches to counteract the economic consequences of the corona pandemic. The IMFS conference “The ECB and Its Watchers” is now scheduled for September.
How the economic perspective can be helpful in the coronavirus pandemic was the topic of a previous IMFS Policy webinar with Prof. Harald Uhlig of the University of Chicago. Uhlig gave an overview about current research on the corona pandemic and strongly recommended the implementation of an interdisciplinary task force with experts from various research areas.
In an IMFS Policy webinar on April 16, Prof. Veronika Grimm of Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg described what a gradual easing of current restrictions in economy and society could look like. First of all, flexibility is a decisive factor in her view.
On April 8, Prof. Volker Wieland presented the economic outlook of the German Council of Economic Experts in the coronavirus pandemic. Already at this point in time it became clear that the German economy was heading toward a bigger recession in the second quarter than during the financial crisis in 2009.
A summary of all webinar as well as the videos is available here. A second webinar series is focused on macroeconomic modelling and the coronavirus. The videos and presentations of these events called MMCN Webinar Series on Macroeconomic Modelling and Pandemics is available here. The CEPR Network on Macroeconomic Modelling and Model Comparison (MMCN) is network of researchers interested in macroeconomic modelling initiated by the IMFS and the Hoover Institution at Stanford Universtiy under the auspices of the London-based Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). Infomation regarding macroeoconomic modelling and the platform is available.